Twitter vs. Poetry
It struck me the other day, reading an
article in the local paper, that we have come full circle. As with many
of these things – your mind is like a percolator. You add the
ingredients, pour in some time and slowly the concoction drips into your
consciousness.
Language in the business world is always
regarded as something that is mostly a tool, a simple, and often not so
simple, way to communicate between parties with the goal of reaching
agreement. I taught a class this week on social media and as I believe
background is important, sketched the development of such media over the
period of close to 30 years, starting with the first mobile call ever
made – 1973. This potted history then became one of the ingredients in
my percolator. The way people communicate changes with the media they
have at their disposal. The bards sang long songs and told endless tales
as the evenings were long after the sun had set, and their was no
evening news to watch, football matches on the other side of the earth
to follow or other information to be taken in. And there was endless
time to pass before the next dawn. Then print evolved, and stories
became shorter due to the fact that they now had to fit into a certain
format and match the size of the paper and eventually our communication
became that of emails and text messages. And now there is Twitter.
For
my class this week – I asked them to write their own bio, in 140
characters. And the result was nothing short of poetic. Beautiful little
gems of well-balanced, well thought-through text, words that each
carried a meaning and told of one person. And it struck me that we have
gone full circle – if you choose, your tweet can be nothing short of a
poem.
So, in summary – my blog could equally have read
something like this:
Told a tale, wrote a poem
Filtered words & thoughts.
Meaning
at its purest lives on.
Communication reduced
to essence.
Less is more.
Words